read, read, read!
The more reading you do, the faster you will build your vocabulary!
The more reading you do, the faster you will build your vocabulary. Try reading on different topics, with different reading materials. However, there is a vital strategy to reading in order to make it helpful. Even if you read everything in your local library, your vocabulary will not increase a lot if you do not use the correct reading strategy.
A crucial element that should accompany your reading is recording the difficult words that you encounter.
How can reading help?
Essentially, there are two parts to reading, if you are using it for building your vocabulary. The first part is the actual reading, and the second part is the listing of words.
To make the most of your reading, make sure you take in every word on the page, even the difficult ones you don’t understand. Try to make sense of the difficult words by looking at the context.
Making lists – Ultimate Vocabulary vs. pen and paper
When it comes to making lists, you can do it the traditional way – with pen and paper. However, there are already vocabulary building software programs that can make very efficient lists for you, and they usually come with a lot of extra features to make listing less tedious than writing down the words on paper.
Ultimate Vocabulary, the top program today for building vocabulary, allows you to create as many word lists as you want, with your own descriptive headings. The program will then teach you all the words that you put in that list.
You may also update your list at any time. Ultimate Vocabulary provides an option for setting a word to "mastered" if you feel you have already mastered it. This will exclude that word from future tests and exercises so you can focus on learning the other words in your list.